i adore absolutely EVERYTHING about this game's aesthetics and surreal world with weird fishes that'd be fucking terrifying without the jolly music AND the whole fishing rod mechanic is sick as hell and an incredibly interesting way to move and platform. this could have very well been my favorite snes game ever but dear scott is it demanding. the further you go, the things the game expects you to manouver through get more and more absurd and the fact all this is under a time and lives limit makes it so much crazier. give me the will to train speedrunning this daily and it'd be an easy 9/10.

the whole randomly appearing enemies thing is not as big of a deal to me as it is to others. it's pretty easy to tell where they'll show up and the game prevents them from spawning right where you are, so i've had few moments of running into them right as they spawn. the one big issue i have with it is that the game will spawn like 3 or 4 enemies at the same spot while you're trying to get past them and they're spitting stun-fish at you and it is Not Very Fun. the bosses are kinda lame too. really cool and/or funny looking (i love the idea of a giant tadpole birthing frogs) but too many of them are essentially just "wait 5 cycles until you can proceed".

i'd still recommend trying this one. maybe not beating it, but the core gameplay idea mixed with the sweet and dreamy art is plenty of fun for a little while

frustratingly both really fun and too difficult and luck dependent for me to really get into. the game does a REALLY good job at making you want to beat it, though, by making the enemy robots look like the stupidest fucking assholes. make no mistake: they fucked your girlfriend AND your mother and have FULL intentions of continuing to do so. you just NEED to destroy them so bad and every time you lose they snicker right at your face and would probably start teabagging you if this was a different kind of game.
yellow bean looks like the nerd emoji

the gameplay occasionally hiccups and takes getting used to and some of the gunplay introduces Praying To God as a game mechanic, but past that it's incredibly fuckin' raw, has super fun bosses, and a story that gripped me from the very start and is kinda peak fiction. also making fools out of guards with the cardboard boxes is funny and an all-time favorite game mechanic.

solid snake is the best tsundere in gaming

https://tenor.com/view/i-get-it-omg-danny-devito-oh-my-god-gif-15873107

probably peak classicvania as far as i'm concerned (i have to play bloodlines to be completely sure) mainly because of the cool as hell presentation. i love this series' kooky but simulatenously badass brand of gothic horror and this game does it better than any other one from the series that i've played (save for sotn). the cutscenes are maybe a bit comically bad, but even they sort of add to the general atmosphere. past that, though, i've come to accept that i don't really find classicvania fun to play at all. stumbling through sets of annoying to use stairs and obnoxious enemy patterns with simon's/trevor's/richter's/whoever's limited movesets is just not really fun to me and if it wasn't for the presentation i'd hardly care about anything this series had to offer before symphony of the night.

i see this one get praised a lot on sites like these and i really can't claim to get it. very tedious and boring, samey and has a really dislikable artstyle on top of all that. losing is an extremely harrowing experience because having to start over with placing monkeys on a map so you can go through 60 battle cycles all over again is (and i checked!) the dictionary definition of antifun. why am i even at war with balloons? who was the creative director who decided that "YES! THAT'S what this series is gonna be about"

i have no idea honestly. i never imagined i'd enjoy this game in any capacity, but the truth is it does a lot right. there's a certain allure to it, much like a lot of the DOS catalogue, and i do totally feel the exciting aspect of the realistic/cinematic platforming this has going for it. it's well-known that it's really difficult, and usually with old games like this i don't quite experience it because of my constant savestate overuse, but since i wanted to experience the original DOS version and did not know anything about dosbox emulation, i didn't have that luxury and was forced to play it the legit way. i kinda enjoyed that! it was frustrating beyond belief, but it felt good to actually get through one of these old ass-clenchers without cheating. this game definitely has its issues and there's a lot i could complain about but it was for sure a worthwhile experience.

i am still not into the gameplay of turn-based rpgs, and i'm particularly critical of the way this one does it. no health bars or real explanations for whatever your actions are going to do, so it kind of feels like all the numbers showing up don't mean a whole lot to me and that i'm just bashing enemies blindly. you eventually develop a sense for what you're doing, but at first this really puzzled me and made me put off continuing the game for a long while. and while the whole game has much better QOL than i initially expected, there's still a lot of reasons to complain: you're slow, the movement through the menus can drag, saving the game's a bit of a chore, all around there's many tedious bits about this game that push me away.

it, then, says a lot that even in spite of all those setbacks i loved this experience. the world this game creates is absolutely brimming with creativity, fueled by its own absurdist logic and goofy kookiness that i find impossible not to love. the story is so fun to follow, even if at times it feels like it's being held together by duct tape. the emotional punches hit hard, and so do the horror elements filling up the later parts of the game. what a time.

also any game that makes me give stuff names is going to be subjected to losing a slight bit of emotional impact because i just had to name the main characters shit like "DUDE" and "BROOO" and that i'm attacking enemies with "PSI BALLS α"

probably as good as video games can get if you're any good at this. while i can tackle the first two chapters pretty comfortably, and maybe stumble through the third one, the last two are just so hard in a way that makes me completely confused on what i have to do. gave this many tries playing with limited lives and continues before just succumbing to freeplay by the end, and with that i just received a really neat lightshow. the audiovisual presentation is breathtakingly cool and there's certainly a lot to appreciate about this game, but i need to get good before i can truly say i love it.